Record Traffic For Our “Fake News” Russian Propaganda Website!

Above Photo: Cyrus McGoldrick, takes a photo with his cell phone of an anti-Muslim poster in New York’s Times Square subway station. Thirty-three key organizations promoting anti-Muslim sentiment had access to a combined budget of $205,838,077 between 2008 and 2013 alone.

Although I’ve been totally preoccupied with software issues for the last couple of months, I was very proud to see that the Washington Post includedThe Review in the official list of America’s major “Fake News” Russian propaganda websites, apparently used by the Kremlin to subvert American democracy and thereby foster the spread of Godless Soviet Communism… err, the Russian Orthodox Christianity of Vladimir Putin. Sweeter still was that we received this honor as our traffic reached record levels, and we prepared to begin a major expansion of our content offerings.

The “Fake News” lists themselves, compiled by some obscure academic as well as a tiny and totally unknown new website called PropOrNot.com, were certainly curious ones. Names listed variously include leading rightwing publications such as the Drudge Report and Breitbart.com but also extended to the some of the most popular libertarian or anti-intervention websites such as LewRockwell, Antiwar.com, Ron Paul, and David Stockman, further extending to leading anti-establishment leftist publications such as Counterpunch, TruthDig, Common Dreams, TruthOut, and Naked Capitalism. Popular websites emphasizing conspiratorial views such as InfoWars, Rense.com, and Zero Hedge made the list, as did publications of the racialist Alt-Right such as American Renaissance and VDare. Even world-famous Wikileaks—that firehose of raw, unfiltered information which obviously falls into an entirely different category—reached one of the lists. The proposed solution to this “Fake News” problem was for our monopolistic social media and search companies such Facebook, Twitter, and Google to exercise their patriotic discretion and prevent these ideas from “confusing” the vulnerable public.

Given such a bizarre hodge-podge of webzines and individuals—who knew that Ron Paul was a Russian propagandist?—the only common thread I can find is that the writers tend to be critical of the political establishment of both major parties and are especially doubtful about such widespread bipartisan policies as support for nuclear war brinksmanship with Russia. Strangely enough, the election results seemed to demonstrate that many tens of millions of American voters shared these views, perhaps representing the diabolical fulfillment of Putin’s “Fake News” strategy.

I’ll admit that although our small webzine has republication relationships with several of the media outlets so targeted, I’d never heard of the vast majority of them. However, such an endorsement of fearlessness and credibility counts for something, and I’ll henceforth try to keep their names in mind. Meanwhile, we’ve already run a few pieces more directly addressing the topic:

And it was fitting that a senior figure of the most important “Fake News” website of them all—WikiLeaks—recently chose our publication as the venue to present his own views about the future of the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media, an article that attracted enormous worldwide traffic:

Stepping back a bit, this silly flap in which pillars of the Establishment Media such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times denounced their less establishmentarian rivals as “fake” relates to the exact reason that I had originally launched this small webzine, hoping to make it a convenient venue for those important and controversial ideas largely excluded from mainstream coverage. Indeed, I think we are almost unique among webzines in publishing controversial perspectives both rightwing and leftwing, libertarian and traditionalist, conspiratorial and racialist, and with topics ranging from foreign policy to politics to economics. Since these varied non-conforming ideologies were exactly the ones separately provided on the lists of the condemned fakers, I might suggest that we represent a summary encapsulation of the entire collection. So although some of those other publications certainly dwarf ours in traffic and readership, perhaps one could even argue that we are the absolutely fakest of all the Fake News websites.

But what is “Fake News”? After all, my lengthy American Pravda series—which I hope to soon restart—had been intended to provide numerous examples of extremely important and reasonably well-documented stories that remain totally ignored by our entire MSM, possibly due to reasons of laziness, incompetence, cowardice, or corruption. And since the media creates Reality, surely anything not covered by the media cannot exist and must be “fake,” whether or not it is actually true. Given that the media had spent so many weeks proclaiming Hillary Clinton the inevitable presidential victor, perhaps Donald Trump should be declared a “fake president.”

One of the most shocking “Fake News” items I’ve personally disseminated in those articles was the likely abandonment of hundreds of American POWs in Vietnam, as heavily documented over the years by the late Sydney Schanberg, whose stunning expose played an important role in my own media awakening. In early October I took a took a brief trip to the East Coast to attend his memorial service at the offices of The New York Times, which the Gray Lady held as a fitting tribute to one of its most renowned former representives. The large meeting room was packed with some 300 individuals, many among them the elderly pillars of his generation of the newspaper elite, while Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld were among the speakers.

It is hard to imagine a more respectable or establishmentarian media gathering, yet two of the other speakers also directly mentioned Schanberg’s remarkable POW findings, and the shame of the media in refusing to acknowledge or even investigate the truth of those historical claims. And in my private conversations, a couple of knowledgeable attendees suggested to me that the reason for the continued media silence was Henry Kissinger, age 93 but still enormously influential in elite circles, whose likely role at the absolute center of the cover-up prevented the truth from coming out; but once he finally left the scene, a mammoth national scandal would no longer be kept hidden by our lapdog media.

Meanwhile, closer to home, I’m very pleased at our growing readership, and with my current software efforts approaching their successful conclusion, I hope to considerably expand our coverage in various areas, taking advantage of the political opening provided by the remarkable events of the last few weeks. The total accumulated volume of our comments—as always, ranging from the erudite to the deranged—is now at the edge of the hundred million word mark, a truly enormous volume of what is often very detailed alternative perspectives. In this Age of Twitter, a medium of political discourse that seems almost totally worthless to me, I’m very glad to provide a alternative venue for those whose ideas of the world cannot be squeezed into just 140 characters.

As an excellent example of this broader project, a couple of days ago I incorporated the previously published writings of Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski, a corpus of controversial historical and political analysis that comes to well over 250,000 words. His recent book review we published on the political dynamics of the establishment of the State of Israel had provoked considerable discussion, and I happened to discover that over 15 years ago he’d written a very detailed and impressive review of Thomas Mahl’s book on the British espionage efforts to secure America’s entry into World War II, a topic I myself had covered myself in late August. During the preparation of my own article, I had naturally googled around to locate previous discussions, and my total failure to discover his fine piece was partly due to its location on a rather small conservative-libertarian website called The Last Ditch. This led me to realize how unfortunate it was that so much of his other analysis had probably remained similarly hidden away in an obscure corner of the Internet, and I made arrangements to republish his collected material, most of which appeared in the last fifteen years and heavily focuses on the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War, and the politics and history of the Middle East in general. Here are links to three of his longest articles, as well as his main Archive page, allowing you to evaluate his analysis for yourself:

Researching and writings all these long articles, containing thousands of footnotes, obviously required an enormous amount of dedicated time and effort, while fully incorporating them into our highly-automated website took only a day or two. I hope to regularly follow this enormously-efficient approach to augmenting the content material we provide. In many ways, I originally envisioned this website as primarily a convenient content-distribution channel and commenting platform, and this just as easily applies to archival writings as well as articles that touch the daily headlines.

Finally, I’m saddened to announce that our resident science blogger Razib Khan has joined a new business startup intending to revolutionize the publication of scientific articles, and therefore will be moving his blog to their website, which will shortly be released. Razib began his GNXP blogging career in the early 2000s, taking it through several different incarnations and websites, and ultimately bringing it to The Reviewon the first day we launched. We will very much regret the loss of his incisive analysis, focused primarily on evolutionary biology issues but also demonstrating a deep knowledge of numerous historical epochs and civilizations. We’re disappointed to lose him, but fully understand his desire to directly participate in bringing the Internet Revolution into the staid and stodgy world of academic scientific publishing.